Every cloud...

So a few weeks ago, it was glass recycling day and we had put our box out as usual.  It was 11.30pm and I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard what sounded like someone putting their own glass into our box.  This happens quite often when people collect more glass in the fortnight than they can fit in their box, and why would we mind, as long as they don't overfill the box so much that it doesn't get collected.

Anyway, moments later I heard a loud crash and jumped out of bed, ran to the front door and looked down the street to see - nothing.  I didn't realise straight away what had happened, but what we think happened was that someone picked up the neighbour's recycling box, and threw it at our house, the result of which was three bottles from the box smashed one of our front windows and landed in the lounge, and the box and the rest of the bottles were left on the front lawn.  Don't ask me why - if you wanted to smash a window surely a  single bottle would have been easier.  And why not use our recycling box, which was closer to hand?  And since both of the neighbouring properties front right onto the road whereas ours is set back, surely it would have been easier to smash one of those than hurl the whole recycling box a few metres?  Who knows, but anyway, that is what happened.

By the time we realised we had been victims of crime we had no chance to catch the villain and all we could do was hope no-one would try to climb through the window during the night and steal anything.  I hardly slept all night for worrying, but it was fine and I got a glazier in first thing to repair the glass.  The repair cost about $200 and I was pleased to discover that glass doesn't have an excess on the insurance so we put in a claim.  Now all we have to do is remember to paint the new putty "a minimum of 3 weeks and a maximum of 4 weeks after installation".  Quite a narrow window of opportunity there, pardon the pun.

Now for the silver lining.  We had been meaning to repair a few of the windows at the back of the house but hadn't got around to calling a glazier to assess the situation.  I had no excuse this time with a glazier on site so got them to glaze in a couple of the windows to the basement which had been boarded up since we moved in.  Neither window can be opened now since neither had sashes but were just holes, effectively, but that's ok, since we never open the windows in the basement anyway.  The cost of the repairs was $400 and as I said it was something I have been meaning to do since the boarded up windows made the house look untidy.

And here are the before and after shots.  Funny thing is it looks so natural not to have boarding that you can hardly see what you're looking at in the second photo.  Trust me there is glass in the bottom of that sash, it is just so clean you can't tell.

As with all of our projects, you solve one problem and it highlights the next worst problem:  now it is becoming blindingly obvious to me that the walls need repainting.